By Ian Bell • Twitter: Ian_Bellio • January 2020

The top five most common genera of tree in the city limits of San Franciso, according to the City of San Francisco tree census 1. Place your mouse over trees on the maps below to explore individual species in each genera, tree locations, sizes (expressed as inches in diameter at breast height(dbh)), and dates planted.

1. Fruit Trees (Prunus)

Japanese Cherry (Prunus serrulata) | Photo Myrabella used under CC license

Japanese Cherry (Prunus serrulata) | Photo Myrabella used under CC license

The most common type of tree in San Francisco are fruit trees of the genus Prunus. According to the data, there are 15164 trees of this genus in the city limits. The oldest tree of this type on record in the database was planted in July 1969 and is 50.5 years old.

Fruit Trees in SF

2. Platanus

American Sycamore • By Famartin - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36997385

American Sycamore • By Famartin - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36997385

Some of the most common species of the Platanus genus include the London plane and American sycamore. According to the data, there are 12195 trees of this genus in the city limits. The oldest tree of this type on record in the database was planted in February 1956 and is 64.0 years old. These trees line some of the major streets in the City of San Francisco.

Platanus Trees in SF

This is fun product for #TidyTuesday, a weekly social data project focused on using R programing languare tidyverse packages to clean, wrangle, tidy, and plot a new dataset every Tuesday. The data is what it is, and this project was more focused on code practice than tree science. Thanks to Yan Holtz and his Pimp my RMD: a few tips for R markdown for helpful tips.

  1. DataSF Street Tree List https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/tkzw-k3nq↩